Google has announced that it is re-adopting its Glass division — a longtime staple of Alphabet's moonshot incubator, X — and releasing the first major upgrade to its AR smart glasses product for enterprise customers. With the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 comes beefier components and potentially wider deployment opportunities.

The spectacles feature a thick frame made by Smith Optics that is dust- and water-resistant to store Glass's technical components. These specs include the quad-core, 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 platform — which was notated as a Snapdragon 710 chipset when the product went through regulatory inspection — with 3GB of RAM, a 640x360 inset display, an 8MP first-person-view camera, three beam-forming microphones, a USB-C port, and a larger 820mAh battery with support for fast charging.

This version of Glass uses Android Oreo for software and supports Android Enterprise Mobile Device Management, meaning that a whole fleet of devices can be easily deployed and standardized with the apps and APIs needed for particular tasks.

Google is pricing this version of Glass at $999, though actual quotes will be for packages that include specifically-tailored software — for comparison, Microsoft's heavy-duty AR headset, HoloLens, is priced at $3,500. Each have their own use cases, but it'll be interesting to see if Glass will achieve volume with its form factor and integration capabilities with enterprise employees and their customers.

Source: Google, Glass

Via: CNBC